UVM home to the first Department of English Literature in the country

In November 1826, the newly named president of the University of Vermont, James Marsh, presented the trustees with a revolutionary plan. Marsh was a Dartmouth graduate, a Congregational minister, and a devotee of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and German philosophy. He had studied or taught at several institutions of higher education and lived in a variety of states. He was uniquely conscious of the inadequacies of traditional university curricula to the promises and challenges of America in the nineteenth century.  

In his inaugural address to the university’s trustees, Marsh provided an outline for meeting the needs of citizens living in a secular, democratic-republic, citizens who were living in a time of unprecedented scientific and technological change. Key to this was the study of English literature and language, because, Marsh argued, Americans needed to be able to participate in the philosophical debates of the contemporary moment. English Literature became one of the four distinct “departments” of learning that all UVM students would pursue across the four years of their tenure and in which some students could specialize. (The others were Mathematics and Physics, Languages, and Philosophy.) Thus, UVM became the home to the first Department of English Literature in the country.  

Marsh's educational reforms and his vision for the study of English literature--implemented at UVM in 1827--were groundbreaking. No longer would UVM students learn under the European university curriculum, which had been based on the training of clerics and administrators for a monarchical state. The traditional curriculum emphasized the study of Latin and Greek and relied on a pedagogy of rote learning and reciting. In Marsh's plan, American farmers, scientists, writers, philosophers, and politicians would prepare for their careers with coursework that included the study of their new country’s chosen tongue and the history of literature in English. As Marsh’s ideas became practical realities at UVM, they helped shape key figures in American letters, such as H.J. Raymond, the founder of The New York Times and Vermont's own John Dewey, a world-renowned psychologist, pragmatist philosopher, and leader of progressive education in the first half of the twentieth century.  

Image above of American authors of the 19th Century, engraving after a painting by Thomas Hicks, 1866.  

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